


No Fear.  Just Love.

by DangersUntoldHardshipsUnnumbered



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F, Gen, Magazines, Newspapers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-13
Updated: 2018-02-13
Packaged: 2019-03-17 21:52:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13668012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DangersUntoldHardshipsUnnumbered/pseuds/DangersUntoldHardshipsUnnumbered
Summary: inspired by this rad piece of tumblr art of a fake CatCo Magazine cover of Alex Danvers:https://foleypdx.tumblr.com/post/169716157947/dont-want-to-jinx-it-but-i-feel-like-im-in-the





	No Fear.  Just Love.

The office of Alex Danvers is brightly lit, spacious and a little chaotic.  It’s still half in boxes because, she explains, she is still moving in from the smaller temporary space she’d been occupying until this one was ready.  She gestures around, chuckling.  “I’m not sure how I crammed all this stuff into an office half the size of this.”

She’s quick on her feet, offering me coffee (the coffee machine, she tells me, was the first thing that got plugged in when she moved in) and texting while she gives me the rundown on her big plans since she accepted Lena Luthor’s offer to head up biosciences R&D at L-Corp:  gene therapy, exo-immunity, genetic encryption, and, on the side, to amuse herself, a better nutrition bar to help combat hunger in third world countries.

For those who have been living under a rock and don’t know Alex Danvers’s name, she shot to public notoriety after she helped then-President Olivia Marsdin with a daring public-vaccine program involving a time-decaying DNA injection to combat an alien pathogen that had been unleashed as a bioweapon.  This was some five years ago, now, and her reticence at speaking to the public has become a thing of the past.

“Yeah,” she says, her dark eyes focusing on me for a moment and looking suddenly earnest, “medals, speeches, interviews ... that stuff was so not my thing.  The attention was really weird.”

I smile.  This, from a woman whose TED talk on epigenetics has been viewed on youtube over seven million times. 

Is it because of her days as a secret agent, I joke, that she eschewed the spotlight for so long?

Danvers laughs.  It’s a longstanding rumor that simply won’t die, she says.  No, she is not and never was a secret agent.  She just did a little medical research for the CIA.  “I don’t even know how that rumor started.”

I point out that she speaks flawless Russian.  She shrugs.  “I minored in Russian in college.”  And those notorious Instagram pictures of her at firing ranges (the lesbian internet is very interested in these in particular)?  She laughs out loud. “A joke.  My wife is the marksman in the family.”

She says “my wife” with such ease, it’s hard to believe she only came out a few years ago.  There’s a picture of her wedding day with Inspector Margaret Sawyer, on the beach near Las Cielas. 

So, I ask, how does someone get to be one of the most sought-after minds in STEM by the age of 36?

She shrugs.  “No fear.  Just love.”

 

 

**

 

Alex Danvers doesn’t present like a corporate R&D researcher.  She’s casual, leading me on a little tour through the less-secretive levels of L-Corp’s labs, wearing faded jeans and a black crew-neck with the sleeves pushed up a little.  She’s incredibly fit, and she moves swiftly, chatting the whole time as we walk.  She’s excited about the work.  And again, there is that earnestness.  “I’m a huge nerd,” she laughs, as she launches into a remarkable accessible explanation of the research she’s undertaking on “blank slate” genomes.

Her journey, at least the parts that are known to the public, is an unusual one.  Her parents were both celebrated scientists.  They adopted her sister Kara when she was a young teen, rocking her young world as she was suddenly saddled with the new responsibility of taking care of an orphaned kid from another culture who was both a social misfit and a certifiable genius in her own right.  She excelled in school and her doctoral dissertation changed the way synthetic hormone production was developed at Penn State, her Alma Mater.

But the young PhD struggled to find her place.  She washed out of a few jobs due to bouts with depression and anxiety.  She spent a lot of her twenties partying and self-medicating.  An old friend of her father’s picked her up, drunk, from a jail cell one night and exhorted her to join the CIA’s research department and she agreed.  She found a more stable track, but learned to manage her emotional issues.  But most people didn’t know her name until her brilliant solution to the pathogen attack.

It was late in her tenure at the CIA that she met and fell in love with Margaret Sawyer, her first gay relationship.  In previous interviews, Danvers has mostly sidestepped her sexuality, but she’s disarmingly frank about it now:  “I was miserable and depressed mostly because I was afraid of who I was.  The minute you stop doing that, the world goes from black and white to color.”  She makes a little sweeping gesture, seemingly intended to recall something magical.

Why the change?

She considers for a moment.  “You know, I grew up with a brilliant mother who was an example and an encouragement. I’ll be lucky if I’m ever half as good as she is.  But I had a template for what female genius and success could look like.  And you know, I’ve been realizing after being kind of thrust into this public platform, that I have a certain responsibility to all the young girls, and especially the young queer girls, who can’t envision themselves as successful.  I have to be that for them.  I don’t have the right to hide from the spotlight because of my own discomforts or insecurities or what have you.”

No fear.

 

**

 

Alex Danvers isn’t a showman scientist like Neil deGrasse Tyson, but when she talks about the things she’s passionate about, she lights up.  Her enthusiasm is infectious.  And she is remarkably good at talking about complex concepts in language that lay people can grasp.  It’s her love of her work that makes her the best at what she does, and that has inadvertently made her a bit of a celebrity.  She tells me about how you can’t be scared of failing, because then you won’t take risks, and how every scientific breakthrough involves a risk, going back to Ben Franklin with his key and kite.

She guides me downstairs at the end of the interview, and pauses with me for a moment at the edge of L Corp Plaza.  She gestures at the crowds milling in and out of it, taking photos in front of the large Supergirl statue at the far end.  “This is how you get to be where I am,” she says. 

I don’t understand.

“Love,” she says.  “These people are all who I’m doing this for.  I love our world.  I think it needs a little work, but I love our species.  And I love that I’m in a position to contribute so much to where we can go, if our hearts are all pointed the right way.” 

She’s completely sincere when she says this.  And I understand.

No fear.  Just love. 


End file.
